Engineers in various disciplines use design optimization to maximize the performance of a system, a process of selecting the relative “best” alternative from among a set of possible designs called the design space [1]}. They do this through objective functions (or utility functions in agentic contexts), sets of evaluation criteria typically constructed as functions describing the relationships between independent or decision variables [1]}. Optimization algorithms then explore the design space to find a global or local minimum (or maximum depending on problem construction) as efficiently as possible to identify a solution [3]}.
